Brian Harry, Microsoft, discusses (in late 2000) what’s up with the garbage collection in .NET — why did it (and does it) do tracing instead of just reference counting?
Very interesting, especially in the light of Vance Morrison’s recent assertion that type safety demands managed memory.
Malware shipped on a brand new Windows netbook. Discovered (ironically) by Kaspersky Labs, an antivirus vendor.
Of course, we all know what’s to blame for this — contractor hardware hygiene. Still.
So sayeth Jens Alfke, famed creator of Stickies and iChat, about Apple’s iPhone app approval rules and process.
I agree.
Update: Let me qualify that. Daniel Jalkut expounds:
I don’t believe Apple is evil, but they are powerful. And the careless handling of such power produces results that are hard to distinguish from evil. I expect things will get worse, and then things will get better. It’s happened over the years in other areas where Apple has stumbled. They will become less oblivious and more receptive to criticism about the App Store approval process. At some point it might even feel fair, transparent, and equitable.
“Apple is Evil”, the title, after all, of this post, is a wide net to cast and demonstrably not true for a variety of circumstances. But I do believe, just like Jens, that Apple is acting evil. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again; almost every piece of technology at work in the iPhone, the App Store and the iPhone SDK is a shiny jewel that on its own is not harmful. It is perfectly reasonable to wish, on your own, to lock down apps to the ones you’ve chosen, to require certificates of a certain order, and to quarantine them. You can do much of this today with UNIX permissions and jails (the technology that “jailbreak” is named after, for heaven’s sake).
It is the way in which Apple applies this technology that is corrosive to the freedom of every iPhone user, the usefulness of the device itself, the imagination, capability and morale of its developers and ultimately every single party involved — including Apple itself, when the market, by which I mean the people, will eventually get a good enough alternative that they can turn down these shenanigans and opt for a better device. Apple is treating their users like children, attempting to block access to what’s theirs, censoring nudity and cursing under the pretense of safety and moral and ethical decrepitude. We’ve literally seen this movie before and the reason I keep coming back to this argument is that it still makes no sense to me that Apple wouldn’t see it, clear as day.
Even if you polish this process to a mirror shine, it might under the right circumstances feel, but it will never be “fair, transparent, and equitable”. The iPhone App Store is trying to be the People’s democratic dictatorship, and it’s currently failing, but even if it weren’t, it’d still be a dictatorship.
Anil picks apart and speculates in Windows 7′s branding.
He hits a point that I agree with: Windows 7 is the first Windows that looks good. Period. Windows 3.11 was utilitarian, and Windows 95 was utilitarian with a 3D (and in retrospect, NeXT-ish) bent. XP was of course Fisher-Price town (if you didn’t choose the silver theme and switch to Royale when it leaked, I don’t want to talk to you anymore; you’re almost as hopeless as the “Windows Classic” users), and Vista managed to fuck everything up with the horrible blue/green color scheme and the crippled but non-customizable Aero Classic — smooth move, guys.
Windows 7 looks good, and not just “good for Windows”; just plain good. From what I’ve seen of the branding, it’s uncharacteristically light. Very un-”Wow” and by definition therefore tolerable. Microsoft will naturally find a way to crap up at least this part of it one way or another, but so far reasonably good.